As a small business, you should be reaching out to customers in every way possible trying to gain an edge on the competition. With more than 1.8 billion active users a month, Facebook is a prime location to start a marketing campaign and they want you to succeed. Facebook provides a variety of tools to help you become an expert at social media marketing and innovate new ideas to become better than the competition. Here are three features you can use to help your small business reach its target audience.

1. Product Shops

You can now sell your products directly from your Facebook page. This gives you a new way to sell your products online and by following the Facebook’s simple instructions, you can get set up in a few minutes. During the setup you have two options, one allows customers to pay directly on your Facebook page and the other takes them to your website for checkout. A product shop allows you to tap into Facebook’s existing users as well as your dedicated fans. It is a huge convenience for customers who never have to leave the social media network. Plus, this feature is free. Facebook does not charge a fee for using this feature helping it compete with other online marketplaces such as Etsy and Shopify.

2. Facebook Ads

Through Facebook Ads, you can learn the art of creating a unique advertisement giving your business an additional outlet to reach its audience. This feature allows for a variety of placement options beyond a person’s traditional news feed. There are two new ad placements that can help your brand reach a new audience as well as beat the competition to this premier location.

You can create ads that when clicked opens a Facebook Messenger conversation. You can use a single image, video or slideshow for your advertisement and create a standard message or video that opens automatically for customers who click on your ad. This allows customers to interact with you immediately and gives them a personalized experience. You will be able to answer questions, schedule appointments or continue a conversation with them about your goods or services inside the Messenger app.

With Facebook videos’ high popularity, a new territory for ads will be in the middle of live or taped videos. This prime spot for advertisements allows businesses to deliver a 5-15 second mid-roll video ad. Since viral videos are all the rage, this could be the perfect location for your next advertisement. Plus, this ad campaign will bring more brand awareness, because viewers will have to watch your advertisement in it’s entirety since its in the middle of a video.

Confused on what an example video may look like? This video on the benefits of hiring safety specialists is a great example of what a video ad could look like. It also may be helpful to go exploring on Facebook and try to find some additional examples of video ads.

3. Facebook Live   

Facebook Live has become a popular marketing tool for businesses looking to advance their inventory system and grow their customer base. Live videos used to be spontaneous and customers had a hard time participating, but now businesses can pre-schedule their live videos. You can do this by accessing the publishing tools from your page and then go to the video library. This is where you can create and pre-schedule your videos. By pre-scheduling, you create anticipation from the audience and viewers can mark the event on their calendar with notifications to remind when your live video is about to start. Pre-scheduling your video makes sure you reap the most benefits from your live stream.  

Once your product shop is setup, you can use Facebook Live to do an infomercial style video. This little known feature can only be used on your business page. Now, when you mention items in your live stream you can tag the products in your video giving viewers a direct link where they can purchase your merchandise.  

These are just a few of the new features Facebook has rolled out to help small business market their products through social media. While new features come out every week, get a head start on marketing with product shops, Messenger ads and Live stream infomercials.